The Times of London is reporting that Nobel laureate Stanley Prusiner, the man generally credited with the discovery of mad-cow-disease-causing “prions,” may have found a cure for the disease. After just 19 days of an experimental treatment, a 20-year-old British female has shown a remarkable reversal in the symptoms of her new-variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (nvCJD). Her father told Agence France Presse that she “has been cured of [mad cow disease], of that there is no doubt in my mind.”
The treatment took place at the University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco; however, American newspapers have been cautious about reporting on this event. In fact, the only mad-cow news to make it into domestic papers over the weekend centered on a scare-mongering press release from the Center for Science in the Public Interest. CSPI’s Caroline Smith DeWaal has issued a formal petition to the US Department of Agriculture, hoping to force meat processors to enact even stricter mad-cow screening than they already have in place. In a statement to the press, DeWaal carped: “USDA has not taken adequate precautions to protect the human food supply.”
